WEDDING RING
395
you are prying into my affairs--and I will not tolerate it." Cass stam–
mered out some excuse before she cut in to say, "But if you must know,
I'll tell you. I took her there."
For a moment Cass was genuinely confused, "Her?" he ques–
tioned. "Phebe," she replied, "I took her to Paducah, and she's gone."
"Gone-gone where?"
"Down the river," she answered, repeated, "down the river," and
laughed abruptly, and added, "and she won't look at me any more
like that."
"You sold her?"
"Yes, I sold her. In Paducah, to a man who was making up a
coffie of negroes for New Orleans. And nobody knows me in Paducah,
nobody knew I was there, nobody knows I sold her, for I shall say she
ran away into Illinois. But I sold her. For thirteen hundred dollars."
"You got a good price," Cass said, "even for a yellow girl as
sprightly as Phebe." And, as he reports
in
the journal, he laughed
with some "bitterness and rudeness," though he does not say why.
"Yes," she replied, "I got a good price. I made him pay every
penny she was worth. And then do you know what I did with the
money, do you?"
"No."
"When I came off the boat at Louisville, there was an old man,
a nigger, .sitting on the landing stage, and he was blind and picking
on a guitar and singing 'Old Dan Tucker.' I took the money out of
my bag and walked to him and laid it in his old hat."
"If
you were going to give the money away- if you felt the
money was defiled- why didn't you free her?" Cass asked.
"She'd stay right here, she wouldn't go away, she would stay right
here and look at me. Oh, no, she wouldn't go away, for she's the wife
of a man the Motley's have, their coachman. Oh, she'd stay right
here and look at me and tell, tell what she knows, and I'll not abide it!"
Then Cass said:
"If
you had spoken to me I would have bought
the man from Mr. Motley and set him free, too."
"He wouldn't have sold," she said, "the Motleys won't sell a ser–
vant."
"Even to be freed?" Cass continued, and she cut
in,
"I tell you
I won't have you interfering with my affairs, do you understand that?"
And she rose from his side and stood in the middle of the summer
house, and, he reports, he saw the glimmer of her face
in
the shadow
and heard her agitated breathing. "I thought you were fond of her,"
Cass said.
